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ordered the portrait covered. He couldn’t bear the thought of anyone gazing upon it and wistfully remembering the man he had been. If he hadn’t been such a sentimental fool, he would have had it destroyed, just as he had been.
    He groped for the edge of the sheet, then snatched it away. “There! What do you think of my face now?”
    Gabriel stepped back to lean against the gallery rail, allowing her to study the portrait without him breathing down her neck. He didn’t need his sight to know exactly what she was seeing. He had gazed at that same face in the mirror every day for almost thirty years.
    He knew the way shadow and light played over every beautifully sculpted plane and hollow. He knew the tantalizing hint of a dimple in its rugged jaw. His mother had always sworn he’d been kissed by an angel while still in her womb. At least once a golden haze of beard-shadow had started to darken that jaw, his sisters could no longer accuse him of being prettier than them.
    He knew that face and he knew its effect on women. From the maiden aunts who could never resist pinching his rosy cheeks when he’d been a babe to the debutantes who giggled and blushed as he doffed his hat to them in Hyde Park to the beautiful women who had eagerly tumbled into his bed for little more than the price of a dizzying turn around the ballroom and a seductive smile.
    He doubted even the prickly Miss Wickersham could resist its charms.
    She studied the portrait in silence for a long time. “He’s handsome enough, I suppose,” she finally said, her voice musing, “if you fancy the sort.”
    Gabriel frowned. “And just what sort might that be?”
    He could almost hear her pondering her words. “His face lacks character. He’s someone to whom everything has come too easily. He’s no longer a boy, but not yet a man. I’m sure he’d be pleasant enough company for a stroll in the park or an evening at the theater, but I don’t think he’s someone I would care to know.”
    Gabriel reached toward the sound of her voice, his hand closing over the soft part of her upper arm through the wool of her sleeve. He tugged her around to face him, genuinely curious. “What do you see now?”
    This time there was no hesitation in her voice. “I see a man,” she said softly. “A man with the roar of cannons still ringing in his ears. A man bloodied by life, but not beaten. A man with a scar that draws his mouth into a frown when he might actually long to smile.” She ran a fingertip lightly along that scar, raising gooseflesh on every inch of Gabriel’s body.
    Shocked by the intimacy of her touch, he caught her hand in his, drawing it down between them.
    She quickly tugged it out of his grasp, the briskness returning to her voice. “I see a man in desperate want of a shave and a clean change of clothing. You know, there’s really no need for you to go wandering about looking as if you’d been dressed—”
    “By a blind man?” he dryly provided, as relieved as she was to return to familiar footing.
    “Have you no valet?” she asked.
    Feeling a determined tug on the cravat he’d fished off the floor of his bedchamber and draped carelessly around his neck, he batted her hand away. “I dismissed him. I can’t stand to have anyone hovering over me as if I’m some helpless invalid.”
    She chose to ignore that particular warning shot fired across her bow. “I can’t imagine why. Most gentlemen of your station with two perfectly good eyes are quite content to stand with their arms outstretched and be dressed as if they were children. If you won’t stand for a valet, I can at least have the footmen draw you a hot bath. Unless you have some objection to bathing as well.”
    Gabriel was about to point out that the only thing he had an objection to was her when a new thought struck him. Perhaps there was more than one way to goad her into giving notice.
    “A nice hot bath might be just the thing,” he said, deliberately injecting a silky